Names, brands, writing, and the language of commerce.

June 28, 2018

Welcome to 2018, when a U.S. president takes to Twitter to threaten a 115-year-old American company that it will be “taxed like never before!” in retaliation for the company’s decision to move some production to Europe. The decision came after the European Union imposed a 31 percent tariff on imported motorcycles in response to the president’s new unilateral tariffs on imported steel and aluminum.

The company is Harley-Davidson, founded in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1903 and still headquartered there.

A 1912 ad for Harley-Davidson, modestly touting “the motorcycle that is not uncomfortable.”

The meaning of the Harley-Davidson name is right there on the surface: The company was founded by William S. Harley and brothers Arthur and Walter Davidson back when naming companies after yourself was standard operating procedure. But there’s plenty of other Harley-Davidson naming lore that makes for good reading.

Harley-Davidson’s current advertising slogan, “All for Freedom, Freedom for All,” introduced in 2017, acquired a little extra nuance this week.

June 15, 2018

Earlier this week, a Utah grocery chain pulled three soda brands from its shelves after a customer, Kate Boyle, tweeted that she was “shocked and horrified” by the name of one of the brands: “Not See Kola.” (Boyle’s account is now private.)

The other brands are “Orthodox Jooce” (made from Concord grape juice), and “Leninade,” which I wrote about in a 2011 post about brands that appropriate the imagery and language of 20th-century Communism. All three brands are distributed by Real Soda in Real Bottles, headquartered in Gardena, California.

It was the second time in two months that a Utah customer had criticized the Not See Kola name on social media. In April, Macy Moon wrote on Facebook that she was “very disappointed to see something so tasteless come from a Utah company.” The company’s response to Moon could hardly be construed as an apology. “We respect and understand that everyone has differing senses of humor,” the company wrote. “Our goal is to provide a wide variety of sodas and flavors that everyone can enjoy.”

May 03, 2018

Cambridge Analytica, the “embattled political consulting firm” that was involved in the Facebook data-harvesting scandal, has filed for bankruptcy and closed its U.S. offices, according to reports yesterday in the New York Times and other media outlets. Out of the ashes has risen something called Emerdata, “a mysterious British company” (per Mother Jones) whose board includes two daughters of Robert Mercer, “the enigmatic hedge-fund investor and right-wing power broker” (MJ again), as well as three Britons who had held senior roles at Cambridge Analytica. “The story, in other words,” writes MJ’s Andy Kroll, “is far from over.”

December 27, 2017

On January 5, at its annual meeting in Salt Lake City, the American Name Society will select its names of the year for 2017. Names of the year are those “that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States and Canada.” I won’t be attending this year, but I’ve made my own list and checked it at least twice. Feel like playing? I invite you to submit your own nominations in the four official categories.

There’s a whole lot of backstory to this weird cultural moment; if you’re not already familiar with the connection between U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore, Fox broadcast personality Sean Hannity (“I’m not a journalist jackass”), and the subsequent brand kerfuffle (or Keurfuffle), I refer you to the original Washington Post storyabout the women who’ve accused Moore of sexual misconduct, an AOL story about Hannity’s sycophantic interview of Moore, and the Media Matters coverage of advertisers who subsequently distanced themselves from Hannity’s shows. One of those advertisers was, of course, Keurig. And because a small appliance is a cheaper symbol of Liberal Perfidy than, say, a Volvo, the internet was suddenly sputtering with self-congratulatory “Keurig Smash Challenge” selfies.

"If Trump is elected, in little more than a year people will be smashing coffee makers in support of child molesters!" -Kicking myself over deleting that prediction.

Naturally, journalists have analyzed the phenomenon from all angles. (Ian Crouch in the New Yorker is especially good.) But what about the brand name at the center of the story? What does it mean, where does it come from, and how should we pronounce it?

October 30, 2017

With the return to Standard Time on Saturday night – not a moment too soon, in my opinion – it’s pleasant and fitting to consider the lovely word vespertine, an adjective meaning “of the evening.” The root is Latin vesper, which means “evening star” (it’s related to Greek Hesperus, the personification of that star, the nighttime incarnation of Venus), and came into English in the late 14th century from French vespre (“evening” or “nightfall”). Vespers, the evening prayer service in some Catholic and Protestant denominations, originated in the early centuries of the Common Era, making it one of the oldest of Christian traditions.

Vespertine is rarely seen in normal conversation – it doesn’t show up among the 60,000 most frequently used English words – but it recently received a jolt of attention thanks to a new and much-talked-about Los Angeles restaurant called Vespertine, possibly because it serves only the evening meal. (Or maybe the chef is a fan of Björk. See below.) I say “possibly” because despite the flurry of reviews by prominent food writers, a lot about Vespertine remains a mystery, including why a 22-seat restaurant takes up all four floors of a weirdly undulating building in Culver City.

The Vespertine building, designed by Eric Owen Moss, is made of red steel meant to evoke Mars. Photo via Genius Kitchen.

September 21, 2017

If you’re inclined to spend $100,000 or more for a fully loaded urban tank, Range Rover has just the thing for you: its new Velar SUV.

Picky people will point out that it’s Tata Motors’ Jaguar Land Rover Range Rover Velar. (Jaguar Land Rover has been a wholly owned subsidy of Mumbai-based Tata Motors since 2008. Tata Motors is a subsidiary of the Tata Group, founded by the marvelously named Ratan Tata.) But that’s a mouthful, and what I’m really interested in – as are you, I’m guessing – is the new name: Velar.

September 08, 2017

Last weekend Peter Daou, a political blogger and former adviser to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, launched Verrit, a website that purports to be “for the 65.8 million.” The number refers to the popular-vote plurality won by Clinton in 2016 (which, of course, was insufficient to win the Electoral College, ergo President Trump). And numbers play a big role in the Verrit brand, which so far consists of quotes and statistics presented on the web equivalent of index cards, each one topped by a headline and bottomed, as it were, with a “Verrit.com authentication code.” Each “card” is called a Verrit, as is the collective endeavor.

But other people within and outside the media were skeptical, or even snarky. “Peter Daou continues to embarrass Hillary Clinton,” wroteSarah Jones in the New Republic. At New York, Brian Feldman called Verrit “the product of an unraveled mind that would prefer to relitigate the 2016 Democratic primary and general election until our sun burns out.” “A sad nostalgia act, ahead of its time” was the summary judgment of Politico’s Jack Shafer. Note, please, that none of these publications could be called right-of-center.

Enough background. Where, you are probably wondering, does the “Verrit” name come from, and what does it mean?

April 06, 2017

“Broadly speaking,” Winston Churchill may or may not have said*, “short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.” With Oath, the name of the new division that will house AOL and Yahoo’s media and business-to-business properties after those two companies merge, parent company Verizon gets a twofer: short and old.

The name was revealed in a cryptic tweet from AOL CEO Time Armstrong on Tuesday afternoon: “Billion+ Customers, 20+ Brands, Unstoppable Team. #TakeTheOath. Summer 2017.” Twitter predictably piled on, not without justification. But I solemnly pledge to give the new name a fair hearing.